Professor Emeritus, Religion, Spirituality, and Society
Stuart Smithers specializes in religion and culture. Trained in Buddhist studies at Columbia University, he writes, teaches, and lectures on subjects at the intersection of capitalism and religion. Smithers is president of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS), which arranges college-level classes for women in detention, and founding president of the Rubicon Foundation in Seattle, which provides education experiences to discover the potential of community work. He is also director of the foundation’s Smoke Farm Institute, an experimental project that supports alternative approaches to exploring art, culture, and education. Among Smithers’ writings are the articles “The Spiritual Crisis of Capitalism” (Adbusters) and “Occupy Buddhism: Or Why the Dalai Lama is a Marxist,” in the award-winning magazine Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, where he is a contributing editor. He is also the founding editor of Black Box—A Record of the Catastrophe (PM Press), an international review of arts and letters dedicated to the critique of capitalism.